After he agreed to hold off on a fresh round of attacks over the weekend, President Donald Trump declared in a Truth Social post that “Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!”

Earlier in the day, Iran denied Trump’s suggestion that negotiations on a lasting peace deal would resume imminently.

“Whether Iran wants to admit it or not, we are, in fact, talking of a solution to a problem that they have caused, for decades,” Trump wrote Monday.

Jay Clayton was officially sworn into his new role overseeing the intelligence community, weeks after President Donald Trump sought to delay his nomination.

The former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York was confirmed 51-47 on party lines in late July to take over for former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned in June.

In the interim, Trump heavily pushed Bill Pulte for the job, and appointed the home building heir — with no experience whatsoever in intelligence or national security — to serve in an acting capacity.

Pulte, a staunch Trump ally, proceeded to fire dozens of intelligence officials and pushed out dozens of other career and political staffers.

Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said Monday they’re now ready to support Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general, ending a weekslong standoff over their demands for changes to President Donald Trump’s IRS “settlement” that Blanche signed off on earlier this year.

Both GOP senators sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and both were refusing to support Blanche without written assurances that the Justice Department would terminate Trump’s so-called anti-weaponization fund.

Their deal with Blanche means Trump won’t get his $1.776 billion slush fund to make payouts to people who claim they were wronged by the government — namely Jan. 6, 2021 rioters — but he will get to keep an astounding grant of tax immunity for himself and his family.

“From the outset, we were clear that we needed a written document addressing our concerns on the IRS audit agreement and the anti-weaponization fund that included constraining the scope of audit protection by limiting it to the parties of the Settlement Agreement and legally ending the anti-weaponization fund,” Cornyn and Tillis said in a joint statement.

“We are pleased that the Department of Justice has issued a formal order terminating the anti-weaponization fund,” they said. “Additionally, the Department has acknowledged in a binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit, the IRS and the Treasury, addressing concerns that multiple of our Republican colleagues share.”

They added: “We want to express our gratitude to Mr. Blanche and his staff for working with us on this, and we look forward to voting to advance his nomination out of the Senate Judiciary Committee soon.”

Paul Rivera, the author of the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy on why the party lost the 2024 presidential election, said the lengthy draft the DNC made public left out an important section, The New York Times reported on Monday.

Rivera told The Times he hand-delivered the chapter to DNC chairman Ken Martin in January, but Martin denies that ever happened.

“This alleged report section was not in any binder I reviewed,” Martin told the outlet.

“If we had this in May, we would have released it with the rest of the report,” he added.

The chapter, titled “What Happened In 2024,” which was published in full by the Times, pointed to former President Joe Biden’s decision to pursue reelection as well as the financial situation of Democratic campaign operatives as contributing factors to the party’s failure to win.

Rivera writes that Democrats’ better-than-expected performance in the 2022 midterms led them “to believe they were stronger than they actually were” and also prompted Biden to make the “consequential” call to run for a second term.

“Is there a single point of failure for 2024?” Rivera asked. “Perhaps it is a decision of the President to seek re-election instead of passing the torch, but Democrats do not have a time machine to go back and change his decision, and the particular circumstances of the 2023-2024 political landscape will likely never happen again.”

The passage also says that many of the people who worked at the highest levels of the party and the presidential campaign itself were either too wealthy or privileged to grasp the struggles of everyday Americans.

“They missed important signals about why people were frustrated with Democrats, who seemed not to appreciate or understand their situation,” the chapter reads.

Read more at The New York Times:

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has rescinded the order creating President Donald Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” but the president will get to keep the sweeping grant of tax immunity Blanche announced alongside the fund.

Blanche issued a new order Sunday night rescinding the fund so he could win over Republican senators ahead of a committee vote on Tuesday to confirm Blanche as attorney general. But the new order only reaffirmed that Trump wouldn’t have to pay any taxes he might have owed the IRS.

Read more here:

President Donald Trump’s administration is planning a dramatic overhaul of Head Start that would gut its quality standards, upending the hallmarks of the early education program for impoverished children, two people familiar with the deliberations said.

Head Start, established in the 1960s to help fight poverty, has long been considered by experts to be a gold standard early learning program. Its regulations, which stretch more than 100 pages, outline requirements on everything from child-to-teacher ratios and child health screenings to family engagement.

The Republican administration would replace those regulations with around a dozen pages of rules, leaving most of the specifics up to state and local law, said the people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss information that was not yet public and because they feared reprisal.

Read more at The Associated Press:

Jay Clayton is expected to be sworn in on Monday as the director of national intelligence, almost a week after he was confirmed for the post by the U.S. Senate.

Bill Pulte, who was performing the job in an acting capacity, is set to leave the office on Monday despite previous reports indicating he had urged President Donald Trump to delay Clayton’s swearing-in to keep him at the intelligence office for longer, arguing that he hadn’t completed his work there.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Sunday, Trump praised Clayton, calling him “an outstanding man.”

Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) on Sunday vowed to continue his reelection bid in the face of allegations of domestic and child abuse that he denies, as a deadline to potentially replace him on the state ballot looms.

“I’m not getting out of this race and I’m winning in November,” Miller said.

Despite his projected confidence, a poll carried out by a Republican firm last week and reviewed by NOTUS showed the congressman trailing his Democratic rival by 5 percentage points. Miller’s favorability rating has also dropped, according to the same poll.

Meanwhile, the state’s deadline to replace Miller on the ticket is just days away, pointing to the challenge for Republicans who now appear to be at risk of losing what was previously considered a safe seat for their party.

But pressure will likely continue to build on Miller after Sen. Bernie Moreno, Miller’s former father-in-law, called him unfit to serve in office.

“He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” Moreno, the father of Miller’s ex-wife, Emily Moreno, said. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives.”

A U.S. Central Command senior officer last week asked a group of military analysts to share “creative” ideas on how to put pressure on Iran, CNN reported Monday, as the U.S. has struggled to end the conflict which has already entered its sixth month.

“We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” the officer wrote in a message Wednesday, according to CNN.

The unusual request came ahead of President Donald Trump threatening to order new strikes against Iran before calling them off to allow for a new round of negotiations.

The CENTCOM official’s message reflects the few choices available to Trump as he looks to force Tehran to make a deal to end his unpopular war.

Read more at CNN:

Progressives appear on the verge of sweeping a trio of heavily contested Democratic primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin, alarming party operatives who fear the left-leaning candidates could endanger the party’s chances in two of the nation’s iconic swing states.

Public surveys released in recent days have pointed to significant primary leads for Assemblywoman Francesca Hong in Wisconsin’s governor’s race, for Sunrise Movement co-founder Will Lawrence in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District and for former public health official Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate race.

Read more here:

President Donald Trump on Sunday said negotiations with Iran will resume on Monday after confirming he decided to hold off on ordering new strikes against Tehran.

“It was going to be a massive attack,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “It was going to be an attack that would have been by far the biggest attack since World War II. But they’ve asked us not to do it, they said ‘please, don’t do it,’ and their neighbors said that too.”

Trump added that he expected talks to resume on Monday afternoon.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei has since said there are no ongoing negotiations with the U.S., according to Reuters, raising questions about the future of the conflict.

Key senators unveiled a short-term spending bill on Sunday that would keep federal agencies funded past the midterm elections and into early December as they look to avoid a government shutdown during the middle of campaign season.

The Senate is likely to vote on the measure before leaving Washington at week’s end for its traditional August recess, a period that many lawmakers want to spend shoring up their reelection prospects rather than working in the nation’s capital.

Read more at The Associated Press:

Japan and the United States conducted coordinated yen-buying intervention and will not hesitate to take further action, Japan’s finance ministry said on Monday, confirming a rare bilateral action to halt the yen’s slide to fresh 40-year lows.

The move underscored both countries’ resolve to prevent a selloff in the yen and Japanese government bonds (JGBs) from causing global spillovers, such as adding upward pressure on already rising U.S. Treasury yields, analysts said.

The joint intervention was the first since 2011′s coordinated action to weaken the yen following the devastating earthquake in eastern Japan.

President Donald Trump said on Sunday the United States was helping Japan prop up the yen as a sign of friendship and to help the world economy.

Read more at Reuters:

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a formal order late Sunday terminating President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” to compensate his political allies, a move that follows weeks of negotiations with two Republican senators who were blocking his nomination to become attorney general.

A spokeswoman for Texas Sen. John Cornyn, one of the senators holding up Blanche’s nomination, confirmed the deal, which comes ahead of a Tuesday confirmation vote for Blanche’s nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The other GOP senator, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, did not have immediate comment.

Read more at The Associated Press:

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